Sunday, September 25, 2011

Anoma antu a obua da. “If a bird does not fly it starves”

This Twi proverb: Anoma antu a obua da -- it has been in my hear and mind so much in the past two weeks as I watch my students here stretch their wings and learn to take baby flights in Ghanaian culture. They are taking risks -- pushing themselves -- both as individuals and in community.

It is long overdue for a blog, I am aware and more aware than you know!We have been completely busy for the past couple of weeks with the semester in full swing, lots of assignments due and service projects every which way you look.To begin, we’ve been having a great time at our weekly dinners, inviting guests to come and share food and fellowship with us,and making sure that we have at least one evening of communion together when the intention is just building community – nothing else.

We have also been enduring a large number of power outages, beginning last week when a major transistor blew that supplies power to campus.Since then, the power has been intermittent every day…on and off…off and on...on for five seconds, off for seven hours.We even had to move a lecture on High Life music by Professor John Collins because he couldn’t share his music and slides with us without power!It’s OK, he’s scheduled to return on Monday, and we’re all looking forward to it.If you want to hear an example of the kind of music he’s an expert on, click on this link, and you can hear him talk about it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2z7E_TWMyY

Last weekend we went on our Volta Region excursion, which we extended to two nights rather than one, mostly because of road conditions and some reports of armed robberies on roads that got us and our Institute of African Studies drivers a bit spooked (rightfully so) and we decided to be safe and only drive during full daylight.Well, this was the hope.However, our Volta Region adventure had other things in store for us

We left campus early on Friday morning, September 16th at 7 am sharp, boxed lunches in tow, and headed off first to CEDI BEADS, a bead manufacturing collective where they give you a tour and teach you the process of making the beads AND you actually get to make some.Basically, they crush glass into lots of different textures – some like fine powder and some in larger chunks and place the glass into molds.Now there is a very special process for some of the more decorative beads where colors of crushed glass are carefully layered in to make beautiful bead designs.All the glass types have to be compatible so that the glass will bond together, and over time Cedi (that’s the owner’s name given to him by his grandmother when Ghana switched from the British Pound to their own currency called the cedi) has figured out which glass types work together and which don’t. They fire the beads in kilns that are made from old termite hills where the soil is dense clay (the termites had a chemical effect on the soil).And then they polish the beads carefully with water and sand and sometimes they paint them with paint made from recycled glass and refire them OR they simply string them.We had a great time purchasing beads for all of our loved ones back home after we finished the workshop!

All of us made beads and we would return on Sunday to collect them before heading back to Accra.

After our fun at the beadmaking collective, we headed the short distance to Akosombo Dam, built by Kwame Nkumrah's administration in the 1960s, it was his largest public works project when he was in office, and it created the largest man-made lake in the world -- Lake Volta.We toured the dam with a friend from the Institute of African Studies, Peter Atakuma, who wrote his Ph.D. thesis about women and children’s lives affected by the dam in the village of Dzemeni, just north of where the dam is built.Truly, the dam is a sight to see – the power of humanity to create something so vast that can hold back the might of so much water.

Our pictures do not do it justice.

After we toured the dam and heard all about the good things it does for Ghana, Peter showed us around the village of Dzemeni (pronounced Germany with a Ghanaian accent) where we witnessed children who should be in school, fishing on the lake or working at the harbor, learning about how their mothers (most of whom are fishmongers) have trouble keeping the children, especially when their fathers are absent, heading out onto the lake or way upstream for more lucrative fishing grounds.The people displaced by the dam are estimated at over 300,000 by the government, but in actuality it’s probably far more.The building of Akosombo sent people scattering, ruining their family lives and leaving impoverished people in its wake.Now there are people doing good on Lake Volta, like Sister Eva here who has won Ghanaian Fisher of the Year for Two years straight and she does not let children onto her boats.Child labor and slavery is a real problem with the fishing industry in Ghana.The fishermen believe that only children can do certain jobs with the nets and handling of the fish, but many people are working to re-educate the fishermen with new, better techniques that will eradicate the need to bring children onto the boats.

Here are just some of my picturesof what the lake Volta harbor in Dzemeni is like.

We had some leftover lunches after we finished touring Dzemeni and shared our food with the children of the village.

From there we headed to Ho.Originally we had planned to visit an Ewe Kente Weaving Village, but it was already beginning to get dark, and so we decided to wait for the next morning.We learned that there was a big festival and Durbar at the Kente village, so it would be better to wait anyway (at least this is what they told us at the tourism office).

On our arrival in Ho, we stayed at the Bob Coffie Hotel (formerly the Freedom Hotel) where we ate good food, swam in the lovely pool and just basically relaxed the evening away.Lovely.

Early in the morning, after a quick hotel breakfast of eggs and toast, we headed to the Kente Weaving village where we ordered the special Calvin Stoles that graduates of the Ghana semester get to wear when they graduate form Calvin.Peter met us again and helped us to negotiate a fair price of 16 Ghana Cedi per special stole.And we also learned, on arriving in the village at the weavers’ collective and training center, that we had indeed arrived ON the day of the festival and no weavers were available to teach us or give us a tour!However, the owner, recognizing that he had a lot of student tourists on his hands, quickly opened shop and a few young boys began weaving while we bartered for Kente cloth.A few of us had special pieces made and will head back to Ho to pick up our pieces during the free of week of travel.

Then, after a very late start, we headed to Wli Falls for a hike and lunch, only to learn that the restaurant at the falls was closed and we would need to order lunch to go.So, we had to stop and wait for an entire hour for a lunch to be made for us in Hoehoe at Taste Lodge.I so appreciated the students’ patience here while they either sat quietly reading or playing games (I made my personal best at Bejewelled!) OR the boys started a game of football with the village boys.We finally boarded the bus and headed to the falls for a very short hike and a swim.

That evening we were supposed to stay at the Mountain Paradise Lodge, reaching our accommodation in time for music and supper.However, there was a massive gulley in the dirt road and our bus could not make it through so we turned around and headed up the back side of the mountain for a three hour detour.It was dark, we were on mountain roads, it was raining and we were all still in good spirits.Thanks be to God!The students were playing games (some strange word game) and our driver finally got us to Mountain Paradise in time for a lovely supper and an evening of feeling the cool mountain breezes.It was a wonderful spot and I am so sad we didn’t get to spend more time there.

In the morning, cool as they come in Ghana, we saw the glory of what we missed the night before, climbing the mountain in darkness.We shared breakfast together, had a prayer and worship service looking out at the mountains, and headed for our last official stop – the MONKEY SANCTUARY!

All I’ll say is, WHAT FUN to have monkeys hopping on your back and arms, eating bananas from your hands.We had a blast.We gave Emmanuel, who runs the NGO at the monkey sanctuary a ride back to Accra with us too – nice to be of service when we can.

We stopped briefly to pick up our beads from Cedi and made it back to Accra by mid afternoon!

Lovely trip.Exhausted, but worth it (even with delays and detours).We thank God for teaching us so much and bonding us together as a group.

One last thing -- every week students have been sending me photos from their service work locations and I LOVE this photo that Justine took at Challenging Heights in Winneba -- GORGEOUS! Captures the marketplace their beautifully!

About Me

I am a professor of theatre at Calvin College in Grand Rapids Michigan. There I enjoy directing Shakespeare and adapting classics for the stage, but I also write my own stuff there. Just this past year, I did a theatre for social justice piece about refugees called "GRAINS OF HOPE: REFUGEE EXPERIENCE IN WEST MICHIGAN" based on over a hundred interviews with new refugees settling in my home city of Grand Rapids.
Then...In my spare time I also work as a theatre director for Actors' Theatre Grand Rapids where I produced and directed the the world premieres of two of my own works: "SEVEN PASSAGES: THE STORIES OF GAY CHRISTIANS," and "LINES: THE LIVED EXPERIENCE OF RACE" which opened in the Autumns of 2007 and 2010 respectively. I teach theatre history, performance studies, ethnographic research and theatre, theatre for social justice, and directing classes at Calvin. I have a passion for Africa, sometimes leading Calvin College's Semester in Ghana program.